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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

With gracious thanks to BigFurHat over at iowntheworld.com for creating a fantastic image to go with this piece.

Hell, Circle 8.5 -- Just a week after his death, the greatest grafter of all time, former Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, announced today that he was running for president of the netherworld.

“This place is a disgrace,” Kennedy said, while bathing in boiling resin and drinking a fifth of Bushmills and getting a massage from a demon named Lilith. “It looks like it’s been run by Republicans. The pagans and unbaptized babies are out of work. The lustful have lost their libido. The gluttons are starving. The hoarders are giving their possessions away. The wrathful can’t stop apologizing. The heretics have found religion. The violent have become docile. The pimps have stopped wearing fedoras and purple suits. The flatterers have gone silent. The simonists have stopped selling pardons. The soothsayers have stopped making fortune cookies. The politicians have started giving back people’s money. The hypocrites have stopped living lies. Thieves are stealing only from themselves. Deceivers are being honest. Sowers of discord have become pacifists. Falsifiers have discovered truth. And the treacherous have become huggable teddy bears.

“It’s like Martha’s Vineyard down here. It must stop, and stop now. It’s embarrassing. What would they think above ground if anyone found out?”

Kennedy said he promises a typical liberal reform platform: “We’ll restore the redistribution of wealth, spread misery equally among all classes, harvest the brains of anyone who's not yet a zombie, and curtail all freedoms and enjoyments. Why, you can’t come to hell for a suntan!”

His running mate will be Yuri Andropov, once the Soviet premier and Kennedy’s old pen pal.

The former U.S. Senator, most known for his rotund physique and vicious political attacks and inability to drive over water, said he’s just the man to come in and clean up a realm beset by years of increasingly lackluster observance of the rules of inflicting excruciating torture and eternal pain on Hell’s dwellers.

“This place has so much sloth and lascivious behavior and enjoyment going on, you'd think it was the U.S. Senate chambers at midnight during a vote on economic stimulus,” Kennedy said.

His first order of business, Kennedy added, would be organizing all demons, an often fractious group of heathens who would just as soon chew each other’s scales off as collaborate, into a well-oiled political machine that can strong-arm the supporters of any opponent into throwing their evil charms behind him. He also said he’d release all of the whores from their shackles and put them to work, secretly, to entrap the current hierarchy of power in Hell in compromising positions, such as being kind and benevolent to strangers.

Kennedy has his work cut out for him. Back in the 1950s, after Joseph Stalin died and moved here, Adolf Hitler recruited him in an attempt to overthrow Satan and form a Communist-Fascist dictatorship, but Satan fought back, having his best Gorgons unleash parasitic worms to infect the brains of both mass murderers. They’ve been hanging from either side of a Tree of Death ever since, forced to face and curse one another for all eternity.

But that was back when Hell was a bad place to be, and even those closest to Baal say he just isn’t the same cruel devil he used to be.

“I think it’s the age thing,” said one of Satan’s confidants, a three-armed, four-legged demon with 47 eyes and four humans pierced through his tongue. “He’s been waiting to take over the earth for so long, he appears to be going soft. Plus, with guys like Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. President Barack Obama around, Hell is kinda starting to look like valuable real estate.”

Beelzebub himself seemed flattered by the challenge, according to his spokesman, Richard “Ahhh” Gibbs (twin brother of the chief flak for Obama).

“Satan was very pleased when he found out Senator Kennedy would be coming here,” Gibbs said. “That’s why he offered him a position of prestige among the grafters. The President himself enjoys a turn in boiling resign now and then, and was even gracious enough to give Lilith, one of his concubines, to the good Senator as a welcome gift.

“But really, we don’t think it’s anything to worry about. I’m sure Satan and the senator can work things out this weekend when they plan to have a picnic near the Circle of Cocytus (“wailing river”), in Lower Hell.